


all the jagged edges (of the broken heart made whole)

by hitlikehammers



Series: Cardiophilia Sequence [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Broken Heart Syndrome, Cardiophilia, Codependency, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Happy Ending, Heartbeat Kink, Human Anatomy, Hurt/Comfort, Longing, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Mistakenly believing that the man you love is dead takes one hell of an emotional-physical toll, Pulsepoint Kink, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes never lent much credence to the concept of <i>heartbreak</i>, until his own heart managed the feat.</p><p>It's a good thing, then, that he's in love with a man who is rather skilled at fitting together the broken pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Follows **[suddenly your heart showed me my way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/411375)** , **[the beat and beating heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/422019/chapters/704161)** , **[your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/446596)** , **[echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/450331)** , **[i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/461462/chapters/795460)** , and **[i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/523584/chapters/926410)**.
> 
>  
> 
> My unending thanks to **[speak_me_fair](http://speak-me-fair.livejournal.com)** for the Britpicking and beta-work, and for dusting the sand off my head, repeatedly.

The flat is empty, a void; Sherlock inhales, but he doesn’t, cannot breathe.

Outside the window, through the cracks in the panes, the leaves dare to rustle at a distance; he can’t hear them, doesn’t wish to, but the undulation of their motion in the breeze is hypnotising, infuriating—attempting to solidify a cadence, a tempo and Sherlock knows that any pattern, any beat less than the one his cells know and grasp for in the ether will fall short, will seem a mockery, an insult to heartstrings against a bow and the percussive thump of momentum pumping, filling, flowing; he knows nothing will compare.

There is a clock behind the skull, and it taunts him with a regularity, a predictability, a metronome by which the heart is measured and refined.

There is a pulse: his pulse, in his ears as he sits, as he buries his head into the corner of the chair, tucks his eyes into the fabric, darkness, dim and undemanding, leaving only breathing and the racing of his thoughts; only gasping and the tightness that’s overtaken his chest for weeks, that’s held him in a vice grip and claimed supremacy over all his functions, all his actions and cognition: the point of origin, his foundation, the source from which the poor excuse of a human emerges, a heart without a soul or a mind with addled synapses—inadequate.

Incomplete.

John’s scent lingers on the upholstery; Sherlock breathes, allows his lungs to catch and tremble around the musk, the tang, the memory like sense itself. There’s a sudden pressure, a genuine, piercing pain that spreads out from his sternum when he exhales; it’s devastating in the moments before it fades, but it isn’t new. He’s acclimatised. Just data, just transport.

He feels a flutter in his fingertips, and when he closes his eyes he can remember sitting here, he can remember that first time, can taste the tea on his tongue as the phantom of that rampant radial pulse teased at the distal phalanges, and Sherlock feels a gallop, a jump and a hard slap, a faltering and a lack of suspension as the wet slab of useless vessels, ventricles and veins drops hated, overtaxed and too heavy, too _heavy_ —

Just muscles and organs, just circulation and chambers and useless connective tissues. Transport.

It’s just a bit hard for him to swallow.

Sherlock hears the door creak open without ever having registered the footsteps as they approached; he knows that his own mind is flawed, compromised: he knows that if they’d been John’s feet, he’d have known them without listening, without conscious recognition, without any effort or thought, like a calling, a release for the crushing ache of his bones as they fight hard not to break, as weight and gravity and something impossible, something forcefully faint expands, then contracts in his chest every moment, every part of a moment, with too many moments between and then a racing, a frantic attempt to make up time lost, never to be gained again.

He’s dizzy when he gets a whiff of cologne, something unwelcome that churns in his stomach as it competes with the signature scent of John, makes him curl tighter into the chair: Mycroft. Without the umbrella.

“We haven’t got any cake,” Sherlock says, tries to spit with distaste but it comes out feeble; the bitterness is something internal, the loathing aimed wrong. “You can leave the way you came.

Because John’s coming home soon. John will be back. John will be more than a scent and that is terrifying and comforting and horrific and unacceptable and the only outcome, the only anticipation that renders a reality in which Sherlock finds breathing through the ache in his blood—in his bones—worth anything, worth the effort and the pain. 

Because it is _pain_ , and nothing less, and everything more and larger and all-consuming and dreadful, all loss and serration, all ripping and divesting and deterioration, all the parts of himself that he’s shaped and grown stripped raw and rancid; all that stood before diseased, now, diminished. 

But just a little taller, he thinks; the walls can be taller, and the fortifications thicker, and the distance will stretch farther and there will be echoes but they’ll fade, and he’ll forget, and if he presses _delete_ enough times, regardless of the force behind it or the betrayal of all that he is that rings through every effort, if he does it one more time, just one, it’ll stick, and if he never looks for John’s bounding pulse at the neck and never touches the heat of his skin and never listens to that haunting aria of breath and bones and beating at the apex, intercostal, he’ll survive and John will exist but it won’t break him, either of them, it won’t, it—

It _won’t_.

The conference was only for a week, only six days and seventeen hours, stretched across two-hundred and seventy-three kilometres and stuffed inside shrinking ribs, inadequate, failing—always failing and breathing, boring breathing except for when deeper lungs draw it in, when they inflate after relaxing and Sherlock wracks his brain but it seems something’s gone wrong, some connection compromised, some file corrupted in the process of deletion that locks under passwords he can’t control or bring himself to tap, to tell: secrets saved, seared into the core though the cover’s worse for wear.

And objectively, it’s not been so different, in certain ways. He’s not eaten, barely takes fluids of any sort, but there’s no cool tea on the table for him, and that strangles some vibrant shred that managed to survive, that had hidden beneath the rubble and ruins in him, all the tearing and the frenzy, the melee, the poison and the clarity of purpose where things were whittled, where Sherlock himself was reduced and what mattered, what matters now and always will, where it stood out in stark contrast and refused to fade, remains behind Sherlock’s eyelids and raised, tender, scar-tissue-sore upon his chest like a brand: he’d thought that holding John as the life left him had robbed all qualitative worth from him, had robbed all substance so fiercely and unforgiving that it had scratched, stolen the quantitative too, the deductions and the observations and the sharpness of his mind, the cerebral blood flow diminished because the heart wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ work, not now, not alone, not without its match, its mate; he’d been bereft and there was nothing except that knowing John was breathing somewhere else, inside or apart from Sherlock’s touch, his ability to feel or taste or hear: _knowing_ that breathing exists and takes place even if the air in his own lungs hadn’t the opportunity to touch John before it raised his chest, that is—

“Sherlock,” his brother’s voice breaks through, and it’s... wrong. It stalls the frazzled pounding-lulling, the indeterminate, arrhythmic excuse for pulsation in Sherlock’s chest for the space between breaths before it spurs something, shifts it all so swift and still.

Sherlock looks up, meets Mycroft’s eyes for an instant and reads nothing of consequence except the width of them before Mycroft tears them away, looks down, and that’s when Sherlock’s heart surges up in his throat, throbs, thrums, thrashes like a child and a soul so scared of truth that he cannot swallow, he cannot take in air, he is falling, he is falling before the rope is cut: not a noose, not a noose but the stroke of twelve and the end of days and god, oh god—

“There’s been an accident.”

The words that follow; the words come, and each one delivers its own sort of blow, less a physical impact than an electrical shock, one he feels keenly as it disrupts the already-tenuous communion between the sinoatrial and atrioventricular nodes, the impulses wrenched and rerouted, wicked and so violent, so cruel that he shudders with it, that he can’t draw air and he cannot move of his own volition and to blink is more effort than he’s willing to afford this life, than he’s willing to sacrifice to a world that holds these words, these ideas as separate entities and incoherent wholes: _train_ and _track_ and _malfunction_ , _misalignment_ , _petrol_ , _explosion_ , _mass casualties_ , _no reported survivors_ , he sees how all of these words, these floating syllables, untethered utterances: he can mimic in his mind the way they all coalesce around a single entity, a single truth that Sherlock had been fixated on at the base of his throat, heavy and immoveable, like plasma and porous, poisonous joy turned grey.

John. Train. Home.

_No reported survivors._

Sherlock dares, dreads, gasps as he looks; he dares to lift his head, so heavy, disoriented, fogged and drenched with vertigo; he runs his gaze over his brother’s face and sees every tell he’s ever catalogued, ever unique twitch and angle of Mycroft’s expression. It’s telling their mother her Chausie got trampled. It’s standing at Father’s burial and watching the coffin dip into the ground. It’s their eyes meeting when Sherlock broke his tibia, stares-locked as he’d fallen from a tree branch just that bit too thin, too weak. It’s Mycroft’s chest rising too sharply beneath his waistcoat, and John was slated to leave Leeds, transfer at Selby, be _home_ and Sherlock imagines it in his mind, so different: an embrace, an apology where he’d been ill in his gut before, now there’s no floor to him, no bottom, no foundation upon which to stand and he is floating and falling and he can’t swallow saliva or the sob, nothing, neither, and fuck, Jesus, fuck—

Sherlock doesn’t need to ask which train it was that crashed. Sherlock doesn’t need to inhale to know that oxygen won’t help.

The world doesn’t spin, so much as it fades, desaturates. His auditory perception fails him suddenly, all the sounds from without cascading, enmeshed within the rushing, the tidal sense of imminence and foreboding, of an end that’s come and is but hasn’t penetrated yet; of a blow to the chest, a skewering that he can’t feel fully yet for being too numb.

He hears it, every twitch, every pang and pull of the muscle, every wayward spark and shiver. There is a clock in the background, ticking near the windowsill, and he does not know if time matters anymore. There is a pulse filled with such despair that his hands move to his chest just to hold it, to touch and to know and contain the way that heart takes to bludgeoning itself, paradoxically vacillating along some fault-line between explosion and implosion, the excision and dissolution of matter from the molecules out. 

His hands press to his chest and only add to the pressure, the unbearable squeezing and hurting and _weight > of that pair of fists in his ribs pummelling, knuckles tearing and bones breaking and the vessels splitting open and bleeding, twisting like vines and strangling, only one pattern, only one message, ephemeral, incisive, epiphanic like the grave._

_Let it end, let it end, let it be over, let me follow, let me fade—_

_Let it end_.

And he wonders, as he gasps fruitlessly, if he hadn’t been a fool and a coward, and maybe if the myocardium had been thicker, had stretched wider and loved harder and truer, if he could have known before these months, this moment, what the human heart could hold—no seat of emotion, no literal soul but the gatekeeper, the thinnest swiftest most persistent hand of a clock: and Chronos in the coils without Ananke is nothing, useless, and from the moment he took it upon himself to fight the inexorable he should have known, he should have _seen_ the end of that road where it tore apart in ruin; and for all of this, if Sherlock had simply reached, had merely rested his head on a chest still warm he could have grasped it, he could have taken it and tapped Morse code and Braille and traced hieroglyphs against the periosteum and carved the notes of a solo and a duet all at once, impossible and yet seared against the septum, etched like gospel against the adventitia of the arteries themselves: he wonders.

He knows why the heart holds love; the mind meaningless without it, alone, unfed by no less than fifteen percent of what lives inside that muscle, those veins, given willingly, kindly, asking nothing but to think and do and _be_ as that blood deserves; he understands, perhaps, a piece of it, that the heart will keep on beating once the mind is all but gone and yet the heart, the _heart_ —

Without the heart, what can survive?

With his palm, he holds tight to a riot, and he’s losing acuity, he’d finding it difficult to focus and he feels the uncoordinated pounding too close when he sucks in deep and mimes a breathing he can’t know, can no longer execute with any grace or efficacy, any meaning or reason, no intent or resolve. With the burn of destruction wrenching at his lungs, the stench of corpses thick and the calamitous silence of _too late, too late, too late_ in the callous convulsions of that useless, faithless, murderous muscle in his chest, god _damnit_ then maybe, just maybe he could breathe and combat vertigo and deoxygenation and inefficient blood flow and the failure, the utter failure of the weak part, the whole part, the hole in him that should never rule the head except it always had, it always did, and it was simply so leaden, so deadened and dry that there was no fight, no conflict or conversation, no light or heat or delicious unease and there’s no going back; it’s tangled, now, and he can’t remember the way from this labyrinth, deleted without permission, self-preservation because there is knowledge deeper than logic, he’s learned, and there is something innate within his tendons, his heartstrings, his axons and dendrites that could never let go, that could never allow him to sever ties or be again what he was, so much colder, so much less.

Because Purkinje gave names to the tendrils in the chest—subendrocardia—and the branches beneath the skull—cerebellar; he sketched the webbing just the same and there’s no ruling, no winning, no escaping the abyss and coincidence has forever marked what lesser minds and bloodless hearts call inevitability, after all; and if his mind hazes and his chest seizes harsh, well, perhaps it was all to be expected, in the end.

And yet, Sherlock had stopped listening for fear of the silence. Sherlock had heard static and called it empty because how could he know, how could he have dreamt a world beyond the torrent of the blood in his veins, a world fuelled by loss and fear and the kind of devotion that stroked strings into symphonies, that lit oceans at night and gave him comfort as a child in the dark, lent him context for what he’d never know and never have.

And how could he have prepared his chest to hold this weight, how could he have trained the ventricles to hold steady and not to grow weary for the tension and the terror and the lingering residue, the sense-memory of pulses and exhalations and magnetic poles reversing and the world when the spinning of it stops? How could he have stood and welcomed the epicardium searing, burning, wilting and caving, useless and blackened and dead; the myocardium short-circuiting, the input impeded as the output falls short and the reverse all at once: the necessary input having left him, having gone away to never return and now there’s nothing to spark him, nothing to fuel him, nothing to steady him and the sparks are flying and it’s all convulsing grotesquely and he can feel it as he sees it in his mind’s eye—as the endocardium shirks and shrivels, shivers for the ice at the centre, at the core because the blood’s gone cold, and Sherlock Holmes is falling in a way he’s never known, that is _worse_ than before when that’s impossible, that’s breaking what he’d thought had not survived, what he’d sworn had not repaired but must have, because this is not fracturing, this is demolition; this is not fading, this is conflagration. 

This is not unbearable; this falls beyond that into the unfathomable, the unsurvivable. 

This is an end he’d thought he’d steeled himself against.

He’d only fooled the superficial pieces while the deepest reservoirs within him stayed poisoned, weakened, _needing_ , dying for the denial and he was wrong.

He’d been _wrong_.

Touching John, holding him, and knowing exactly what that heart and the man it belonged to, what that blood and the soul that gave it breath: knowing _exactly_ what it was that made up John Hamish Watson, how it worked and where it dipped and when it soared and how it felt next to him, how it sang in his arms and lent a bounding to his own pulse, gave a joy to his world and a brightness to existence as it shown back into his eyes—

He’d thought that losing John, that watching it and _feeling_ it had been the worst fate imaginable.

But he’d known, and every part of him had railed and mourned and snapped and screamed and sobbed, had come undone without hope of recovery, without genuine want of it, even; every part of him had retreated inward and relived the rhythm and the sound of a heart and two lungs and a voice like clues and comfort and a warmth like home and the opposite of shock. The whole of him had moved only to never lose it, to never forget, and to subsist as necessary until there’d be no need, until there was nothing _but_ John and then, ostensibly, nothing at all. 

And now, there is nothing but the ceiling, where he stares up at the webbing, the moulding, rhythms of paint and plaster in themselves; now there is nothing but his own laboured breath, a mockery, a maelstrom, a pointless waste of time.

Now there is John in his mind like a spectre, and Sherlock cannot make out the shade of his hair, the shape of his eyes, can’t remember the exact angle, the pattern John’s wrinkles trace, and Sherlock knows that there’s a part of him, one of the layers or the bare husk of a membrane somewhere, _somewhere_ that recalls it, that knows in absolute detail every single thing that Sherlock had ever catalogued about that singular soul that meant everything, _means everything_ , all of the things he’d ever dreamt of discovering, of learning and grasping and loving, _loving_ , cherishing like the cerebellum and the hippocampus and the amygdala and yes, and _yes_ the heart, both hearts, John’s as the catalyst and Sherlock’s as a budding, fledgling thing, quivering and hesitant and so unlike him, so ill-fitting and unbalanced and yet he wanted it, he wants it, and now it’s failing, now it’s aching, now it’s shaking and stalling, stumbling and it is gone, it will be gone, he, it, just—

Gone. 

Gone.

Gone.

No survivors. 

There is a clock, but Sherlock does not hear it, it exists in his mind and it counts like an omen; this is a moment, and there is loss. Another moment, and the loss lasts longer.

A moment, again; the shape of those eyes, and why, it’s lost, he’s lost, he _can’t_.

There is a pulse, and he is so aware of it even as it is peripheral: seizing, spasming, sputtering, spilling, he can feel the flame of it, full in his chest as it empties and rushes, so dizzy, so frantic, so wild and waging a war it can’t win, won’t win, the closing offensive, the final frenzy, the first and last testament to what he’d had, what he’d known and what he’d been a fool to push away, to forget now, to need and there are tears that leak from his eyes as he tries to breathe, as his chest turns to bruises, the muscle wrung to pulp and without air, without blood, without _life_ and the will for it, it’s all futile, it’s all for naught.

At the end, he knows—the last thing he knows—at the end there is a rhythm, like a danger, the pounding.

In the end there is a rhythm, footsteps, coming to him as he sinks to the floor and loses all sense, all depth, all feeling; his name is said sharply, worried, loud and yet so dim and Sherlock reels, Sherlock swims, Sherlock’s chest is a wasteland and it won’t raise, his lungs won’t move, there’s a corpse between them, above them, and it spreads entropy and lethal weight, frigid loss, it spreads, it spreads, contagious— 

There is a rhythm, in its own absence, and Sherlock can’t breathe, and his heart can’t beat with any syncopation, any logic or worth.

He _can’t_.

He feels his brother’s hand on his forearm, meaningless, when his vision turns white and he floats; fades.


	2. Part II

To say that he rises to consciousness seems misleading, untrue—consciousness is attachment to the mortal coil, a life, a selfhood, and he’s unsure as to how much of that persists wherever this is, in whatever dimethyltryptamine-induced hallucination is taunting him, calming him, soothing him. There is the stench of antiseptic and white; white is what ended things, white was the last thing he knew and that’s fitting, given the tales, the myths. 

Given that he blinks his eyes, what were once his eyes, what may or may not still be his eyes; he blinks, and he swallows, and he sees before him: John.

John, who stands at the foot of the bed, biting at his bottom lip, flipping through a chart and Sherlock feels a fluttering in his chest, a shivering that defies, that tells the tightness there to ease because it’s over, it’s over, there’s John.

There is _John_.

John, whose breath is deep and calculated, whose posture is rigid, whose spine is so straight it looks painful. John doesn’t look up, he doesn’t look up, and Sherlock should be concerned, Sherlock should feel tense, should need the eyes first and maybe he does, maybe there’s a coolness, an ice in his blood for an instant.

But the worst has already happened, and passed. There is no place to fall from the bottom. John’s eyes, or the approximation of those eyes: they will look up.

They must look up.  

“Do you know what this is?” John asks, suddenly, entirely rhetorical—half-calm, half a challenge as he takes a step forward, flipping the chart, the scans and test results in high contrast, black on white. Sherlock almost tries to focus on then, but he doesn’t have to, doesn’t want—for once, the data is inconsequential, the sequence of events and the significance, the unveiling of logic: none of it matters.

None of it matters, and the increasing proximity, John as he approaches, draws the documents, the evidence closer, lets it loom: the _proximity_ ,  it vibrates on a wavelength untenable, unidentifiable, and Sherlock finds himself exhaling, finds relief in his veins like a balm and a break; finds the squeezing of his heart easing just a bit, just so, because this, it’s irrational, it’s unbearable, he does not believe and yet he might, he could suspend logic if he must because if this is John and this is what comes after and they’re both here by some curse or mercy, then this, then _this_ —

He knows exactly what this is.

“Because, Christ, Sherlock,” John spits, gasps, half-sobs; rubs his hands across his cheeks, traces his brow, his lips, and Sherlock wants it, needs it, wants to touch whatever ephemera this is because it’s John, and something is better than nothing, so much better, and he’d been a fool to scorn what was closer than the marrow in his bones, more central to the core of him than any fanciful conception of a soul.

“If there was any question as to whether or not you have a heart,” John hisses, eyes flashing—those _eyes_ , _his_ eyes, they’re _there_ ; “then there’s your goddamned proof.”

Left ventricular dilation, basal hyperkinesis; the EKG reading displays distinct significations in the ST segment, T wave inversion, generally tachycardic; ventriculography stills betray the telltale apical ballooning, the akinesis when taken in sequence. Obvious.

John Watson, though; John Watson’s voice is pitch-perfect, the tone just so, and Sherlock doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but for the first time he’s grateful to be rendered plebeian, to have his naïveté shift back to haunt him, because if this is what follows and there is John then Sherlock prefers it, because loss is an irrational number, loss resists exact replication, and if they’ve both succumbed then this is infinite.

_Do you know what this is?_

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Temporary weakening of the myocardium. Non-ischaemic, usually induced by an excess of catecholamines. Rare, but not unheard of, often triggered by emotional turmoil, and thus colloquially termed—

“Broken heart syndrome, you complete and utter bastard,” John hisses, his features so drawn, his face so pale, and Sherlock takes a moment to process, to apply logic, fails: wherever they are, whichever plane of being they’ve landed upon—it makes no sense, because John’s rather upset with him, and he’s sure, he’s fairly certain if he’s certain now of anything that it’s meant to be pleasant, isn’t it; most human accounts depict the afterlife as blissful at best, some stasis at worst for a man as virtuous, as kind and brave and bold and true and _necessary_ as John Hamish Watson.

And John, his John, his dear, unfailing, essential John, who may be all the heaven Sherlock Holmes would never have asked or desired, but _needs_ ; John, well.

John doesn’t look calm, or happy, or content by any stretch of the imagination, to be honest. And Sherlock’s rather well versed in the expressions, in the little gives and tells of John’s facial muscles, his body, his being.

Not happy at all.

“They thought heart attack, at first,” John says, his tone forced into a poor excuse for nonchalance, so tight, so tense, so thin. “Uncommon at your age, but stress cardiomyopathy, ’s actually even less likely, to be fair.”  

John stands before him, his weight shifting just so, just a bit, back and forth along the insole of each foot and Sherlock blinks; he blinks, and the pressure in his chest that’s been building for ages, the lead that had hardened and held his heart still when the darkness came and the walls caved in: the ambivalent shivering of the ventricles upon waking as the monitors whined and his mind swam and surged, fell and foundered—where that heaviness was fleeing for an instant, a moment before, it deigns to creep, to slither back and hold this time, to dig the tips of nails in and sketch scars there, to draw blood.

“Mrs. Hudson was sitting out there, white as a sheet,” John drums his fingers on the railing of the bed, and Sherlock feels every tap like a blow, like the sting of a whip, the bite of a chain in tender, tattered flesh, a flayed-open chest, and he can feel it, the pressure building again, relentless, and Sherlock can’t help but look now, can’t help but see the subtle emergence, the painful horror, the perfect pulse at John’s neck, the ebb and flow through the carotid artery like smoke and gypsum, like whiskey and ether and fever dreams, and Sherlock’s mesmerised, he is, he _is_.

His own hands, his own heart wants to reach out, wants touch it, and his fingers itch, his ribs strain, creak for it; he _wants_.

“And your brother, Jesus, the state of him,” John recalls it, a little breathless; “the _wrinkles_ in his _suit_ ,” and Sherlock can feel his own lungs shrinking, back to what they were, withered and useless and limp, vile flesh to have twisted, to contort and string around cardiac muscle like a leash, like a noose; he can taste it, bitter, all iron on his tongue; and he can trace after the droplets of seeping red in his own chest as they fall and lend obedience to gravity and the only thing that saves him from the light, from the dark, is the fact of John’s pumping blood, revealed above his collar for the world to see, ever stronger, ever faster; it’s that single bit of reason that breaks through, senseless though it remains, endures.

“I thought,” John chokes, his voice so broken Sherlock can nearly feel its jagged edges tearing out from the hidden places, the hardened places that had seemed so small. “God, the things I thought before...” Sherlock knows what it looks like, this condition, upon presentation: acute coronary syndrome, myocardial infarction, coronary artery disease, and yet what does it matter now, in the after; but what lies after, nothing makes _sense_ , and the reason tells him, the logic won’t die—

Dead men do not bleed.

“I,” John starts, stops, glances at Sherlock—and Sherlock reads fear and frustration and a misplaced kind of mourning, and warmth as his gaze darts back and forth from John’s arterial wall clashing violent with the skin, to John’s eyes, his facial muscles; he reads there something that strokes at his ribcage and licks at his arteries, and he can taste his own pulse when he swallows, can feel it bursting at the base of his throat. John’s eyes meet his and it’s hellish and perfect and that’s the shape, the shade Sherlock couldn’t quite recall, and how could he forget, he couldn’t, he didn’t, he won’t—

“Sher—” John begins, his eyes red-rimmed and shining as they take in Sherlock’s face and process something, and flicker away, and it’s then that Sherlock hears the whirring, the beeping, the alarm bells shrill and shrieking at his side as the leads on his skin betray the tumult, the agonising mayhem of what lies beneath his skin and strips him bare, gives him away, and John’s eyes widen and his jaw goes slack and it’s John’s hands at Sherlock’s wrist for a moment, and Sherlock could swear to the way his heart seems to shake for fear of truth and lies and the touch, the _touch_ —

“Christ, just,” and John’s so close, Sherlock feels the stiff mattress dip, hears the sheets rustle as John moves up, near enough to breathe into and there’s the scent of him from the chair, and Sherlock’s heart is humming, hurting in a whole new way and the monitors cry out when he can’t, not yet, because it can’t be, this can’t be real, it can’t be true, it’s a mirage; an elaborate delusion but his heart is pounding, painful, and he knows it, he can’t contain it, and does any of it matter, what is truth, is there anything more necessary than _John_ , and aren’t all things relative, even what’s real?

And then John’s hands are on him, steady. And then John’s moving him, so gentle, but sure.

And then John’s pulling him in and settling, curling Sherlock close and holding him, guiding him home to the centre of that chest, and Sherlock is frozen in those long, lonely moments between approach and impact, in the interim, the ether, Purgatory and the Seventh Circle and _then_ — 

His cheek, Sherlock is convinced, was carved to fit the stretch of that chest. His core body temperature has been set to run just so that this body, this warmth will feel like fire and a balm against him, right in ways he’d never sought to fathom. The world, in a moment, in the moment he presses close: it is made of steady breath, the rustle, the soft whisper of rushing blood through the dermis and the epidermis, around the bones, and existence, simple glycolysis, oxidative phosphorylation: all of it is vivid and yet peripheral, vulnerable and inescapable and so cruel a deception that when the hate stings his throat, when the blackness dots the backs of his eyes, when the sharp knife of that body, that risingfalling chest and then—

It’s there. Oh god.

Oh god, it’s there.

The beat. The _beat_. It’s there. It’s John.

It’s _John_ , and it’s real, and it’s _there_.

Sherlock’s never known drowning until that cadence pulled him to shore; never cried for lack of water until the echo quenched his thirst. He’d never known graceless folly until the beat restored his balance, returned his music, gave him reason and logic and a home he thought he could live without except how can he, when his oxygen is pumped by those valves, those ventricles—how could he survive without the beat, the beating, the man that holds him close? 

There are words, he is aware of the words but they won’t come, he’s forgotten their shape, he doesn’t know them, can’t know. He can almost make out the hush, the rushing, the sweet slosh of lifeblood through the chambers, the arteries in and out and through and through and through, and he’s heard the absence, the stillness and the silence in his nightmares, in his every moment between his own breaths, every second when his own heart hadn’t been racing, panting for the separation, the withdrawal like nothing cocaine had ever thrown at him, had never dared to ask that he endure because he couldn’t, he’d have died long ago, strung out in some cesspool, some gutter, he’d have bled from a heart that had never learned what it could be, what it could hold, how it could be _held_ and god, oh dear _god_ —

When he chokes on a sob it shudders too much, it wavers on multiple axes; his own heart is moving from the chest outward, rattling cages but Sherlock won’t move, can’t move and all that kinetic discord, it sends the sob resounding, echoing, and he’s shaking, he’s shaking outward from the nerve endings and the heels of palms and feet, the follicles of his hair and he can’t stop it, cannot pause, he is ruined, he is wretched, he is remade and knows nothing, nothing.

And John, beautiful John, intuitive John who studied the heart, who knows the composition of the body and the mind and understands the quantitative and qualitative anomalies of the organ, the muscle, the passion, the pain; his _John_ is warm, and Sherlock’s heart stands suspended, shivering between the lungs, strung up by the aorta, dangling and fibrillating uncanny, unhinged because if this is real, if this is more than wishful thinking—how _can_ it be more than wishful thinking, but that beat: as ever, there is the beat, the beat, the beat and Sherlock hears it, his ventricles pause and the atria take note and they still, they pause, and for all that he knows, he _knows_ —

“I missed my train,” John says softly, answers the question Sherlock can’t ask, reads it in him and pulls Sherlock tighter to his chest, makes promises that words cannot contain in just the tone of his voice, in the force of his breath, in the steadiness and the tightness and the absolute overwhelming care that his hands, his arms around Sherlock’s shoulders imbue, that he gifts and vows and declares beyond doubt, beyond the entertaining of the potential for doubt: an absolute. Unwavering. Undying.

A universal constant.

Sherlock’s heart gives a desperate, lethal little skip, a little clench before a galloping, a rejoicing and a coming apart as he sinks, he sinks, he gives in, and his eyes burn and his chest heaves and he feels the knocking of his pulse against his ribs as he gasps for air into John’s chest, as he falls apart and loses himself for an instant followed by an age, and oh.

Oh; _oh_. 

He remembers now. He recognises the vacancy, the shape of  the void he’d been walking around with, nursing as all that ever mattered seeps through in its return, in its gifting back, sacred and softened and solid and true and where had it been, all this substance, all this lifeblood and living—but of course, of course John had thought to collect it, of course John had taken all the pieces and kept them safe, and—

No, John had collected nothing. There was no trailing, no slow decay or leaving behind in sections, in parts. All of the things had been removed from him, had been stolen from his chest cavity and left him bereft, alone, unmoored, unfettered, depolarised and left to linger, left to fester, left to fade and decompose; no. Not in parts, only wholes.

Only wholes, because everything was _John_. Just John, always. Never components trailed, just a person, just a soul in two bodies, two souls inside one and a heart that led the duet, pumped more blood than it should but worked miracles, bridged chasms, held a hellish kind of holy like the demons’ song on high.

Home. Light. Oxygen and hydrogen, carbon like the building blocks of being. The inception of the universe. Solitude, Companionship. Communion. 

Sherlock is so aware of his own thumping heart, it almost unnerves him, almost distracts him from the pumping that matters, constant in his ear: his own heart, it trembles, but it steadies; it cries out, but it’s strong, and it aligns with John’s like it’s made to, meant to, all intimacy and breathless abandon and John is open to it, John is perfectly prepared for the sway of it, the raging and the give, of course, of course, it’s John.

His _John_.

John’s shirt beneath his face is wet, it clings. John’s thumb, the print of it: it’s damp, so slick and smooth and cool, like a lens above the warmth of him for the sodium, for the anguish and the grief and the thickness of love that makes the heart beat harder, makes the muscle quake for the force of contraction, condemnation, reverence. 

Redemption.

“You are amazing,” John whispers. “You are brilliant, but you are a godforsaken moron.” John breathes in deep and his heart surges a little, natural; just respiratory sinus arrhythmia, Sherlock tells himself, but his own heart thumps hard, and his hands cling harder to John’s torso.

John, the wonder of him, the incredible force that propels him and makes him real: John only grips him, holds Sherlock, impossibly, all the tighter.

“Jesus, Sherlock, if,” he buries his face in Sherlock’s hair for an instant, kisses the crown of his head and his temple, and Sherlock is sweating, overcome, but he can tell the difference, can sense the introduction of a tear on his scalp as John moves, lifts his head and rests a cheek to Sherlock’s curls.

“You’ve been,” John breathes in again, and his grip tightens automatically this time, his thumb strokes Sherlock’s jaw in preparation, and Sherlock lets himself revel in John’s heartbeat, the healthy surge and settling of the rhythm, that rhythm, that _rhythm_ , oh _Christ_.

“I thought you’d got bored,” John murmurs, muffled. And Sherlock can’t, he can’t, it’s too much, and the air gets stuck in his lungs as he shakes for the force of _feeling_ , as sounds get caught at awkward pitches in throat; as his eyes stream and rub raw on John’s shirt and it’s the first time in months that Sherlock’s felt entirely grateful, privileged, to be alive at all.

“But this, this, you were,” and John’s breath catches, he trembles in counterpoint to Sherlock’s shaking, he presses his lips to Sherlock’s hair again, an emergent ritual, so much, so deep, so full. “You’ve just been trying to hold it together, rein it all in.”

Sherlock’s body betrays him, and he gasps, sobs for a moment, loses control of his lungs, his oesophagus, his vocal cords, and John’s heart beats harder, no faster, as he shakes his head, pendulous, a lament: Sherlock follows, memorises the time signature and the particular dynamics, never to forget a single note or pause.

 _Never_.

“I’m an idiot, and I’m blind, and I didn’t see _or_ observe,” John breathes softly into Sherlock’s neck, curled gorgeously, serpentine, protective around his frame. 

“Everything you did. When you touched me, where you held my arm above the wrist. The way you walked without...” John shivers, almost imperceptible, and it shakes Sherlock loose for a moment, interrupts the feed of John’s beating heart to his ears, across the synapses, into his blood and through one atrium, and then the next and Sherlock freezes, lost again, before John draws him back and places him true and he eases, he relents and melts and _breathes_. 

“The way you moved without purpose, that grace in you, just,” and John’s arms shift subtly, one hand cradling Sherlock chin and holding his head close, deliberate to the centre of his sternum, to the precious noise, like Paradise and Armageddon, the first and the last; the other hand coming around to thread with Sherlock’s fingers, to interlace their holds, to be.

“The way you were so enamoured, of everything, but of this, this specifically, this in particular,” and it’s not that Sherlock ever made a secret of it; it’s not that John had never acknowledged his infatuation before, but there is something in this moment that resonates unlike before, unlike all the times preceding this: something snaps, majestic, in Sherlock’s chest and he is allowed, he is given permission to sigh and release; John’s heart keeps beating strong and still tense, but so sure.

“The things I remember from that night,” John speaks, and whether he means it or not, the cadence of his words falls in time, in tandem with the rhythm of his pulse, and Sherlock’s pulse is close, so close now, so ready to be held and kept close enough that there is no possibility, no potential world in which his own heart can beat outside it, out of line. 

He’s so close.

“The sound of your voice and your eyes,” John murmurs, electricity through nodes. 

“The way you gave everything,” the valves opening, fluttering, chambers filling.

“The way my bruises fit the shape of your hands,” and Sherlock’s chest tightens as both their hearts empty, pump out, but it’s not a loss, it’s not a failing—it’s emptiness to take in more, to let in new, to be now and for another moment: a future that seems made of something whole. 

“I’m _sorry_ ,” John breathes, and there’s the moment, there’s the singular instant, the one true point.

Sherlock’s heart beats with John’s, and it’s a homecoming like nothing else, it’s a wonder that the world can’t contain, and if there are tears on his cheeks again, still—new ones, thicker, warmer, and if his throat burns and his eyes sting and his lips quirk in some hysterical, marvelling joy, then he cannot be blamed for that. He will not apologise, or feel shame.

He can only be adrift in it, rooted in it, all at once, simultaneously destroyed and left shining, left reeling, left _right_.

Oh, _John_.

“I couldn’t lose you again,” Sherlock’s tongue is heavy, but it moves now, it functions and some of the milling sentiments, the declarations he cannot fathom making but might not survive holding back; some of them begin to spill forth, unbidden, disorganised, undimmed. “I wouldn’t have,” he sucks air between his teeth; “there is,” he does not know, he knows too much.

“Matter is finite and atoms are solitary and the universe is quiet in the dark and John,” he gasps hard; “John,  I’m not built for it, I never learned and I was trying, I had tried, and it was worse than how they speak of hell.” His chest is burning, he’s having trouble inhaling with any efficacy, to any end.

“And then you were gone,” Sherlock croaks, all the fight torn out of him, flailing as it ebbs; “and it hurt the same, except worse, it was worse and that’s impossible John, because the most wretched of all things is not subject to gradation, the loss of you is unquantifiable, so how was it _worse_ —”

“Shh,” John soothes him, pulls him up and twists him around, and Sherlock protests, doesn’t want that heart outside his sensing, doesn’t want any space for it to get lost, but John anticipates, draws Sherlock’s palm to his chest and presses it close, and it is not ideal, but Sherlock will endure it, he will manage, he decides, as soon as he sees John’s eyes, overfull with feeling; as soon as John’s lips meet his own, nectar and ambrosia and breath for the dying, the dead. 

“Shh,” John repeats, and then he moves, unprecedented, to place his free hand over Sherlock’s heart in kind.

“You are a madman and a fool,” he whispers, eyes searching, and Sherlock can read the dilation of his pupils, the play of light against the irises. “And your heart is,” John trails off a moment, and Sherlock can sense the way he focuses, takes in each contraction; his eyes slip closed for an instant, and Sherlock can feel John’s exhalations; Sherlock’s heart dares to speed, dares to thump hard and heady until John’s eyes open and there is John, holding it again; there’s John’s gaze and John’s touch and he stays it, calms it, reminds it of the reasons not to beat itself to shreds.

“This heart,” John breathes it out, so soft, almost sacred. “You are,” and John lifts Sherlock’s fingertips for barely an instant, quick as he can to kiss the pads of each digit, careful so that at least the heel of Sherlock’s palm still presses against the aortic arch. 

“Yours is the most intricate, the most,” and John’s own fingers dance across Sherlock’s chest, trace the outline of it, that misshapen thing for the grief; that ecstatic thing for the return, the miracle of it for a mind that doesn’t grasp such mercy, that doesn’t believe in the eternally inexplicable. 

“It’s a muscle, and it was,” John flattens his palm again, and Sherlock feels, more than ever before, more than anything: Sherlock feels cherished. Sherlock feels safe. “It was unappreciated and unexercised, atrophied and you leapt, you cast it so far, stretched it beyond what it knows.” 

John leans in and kisses Sherlock's lower lip, slow, needing. “And that’s a fucking trial, Sherlock," he breathes against Sherlock’s mouth, and Sherlock’s lungs expand to new capacities, take in new depths to feel it, to have John give them life. 

“It hurts like hell but you are a marvel, and you can learn this like anything else, you can hold this steady in that chest, in that skull,” John looks at him, too much soul in those blue eyes before he bows his head and presses into the crook of Sherlock’s neck. 

“You can, all on your own if you need to,” John whispers into the bounding pulse at his suprasternal notch, and he thinks about the fluttering, the half-hearted meandering of his pulse these weeks, these months; he thinks of it, and is almost amazed by the force of his heartbeat, the echo of it, the way it pumps with a purpose, rattles in him, so strong; trilling when John’s last, lingering tears gather in the hollow of Sherlock’s throat.

“But you _don’t_ need to,” John’s lips move, wet and warm on Sherlock’s skin. “You don’t have to do it alone. That’s why it presses so heavily,” and John’s tongue is rough and real, a salve when it sneaks out and touches Sherlock’s flesh, sends his pulse into fits as it wants to reach, to be caressed so sheer.

“It’s made for you to share it, for you to hold it between two chests and two minds and two sets of bones so it’s bearable, so it’s warm and safe instead of searing,” and suddenly, with John there, Sherlock believes it, can envision such a state, such an existence, such an unfathomable paradigm.

“You’re not alone in this, Sherlock,” John says, and his hand is there. “You’ll never have to hold it all again.”

And Sherlock can almost feel the shape of it against the very surface, the epicardium rising to greet that touch and oh, oh, they’re all moving together, now, all the layers, all the pieces and parts and they all serve a purpose, to be close, to be stronger, to touch back when John comes close, always.

 _Always_.

“John,” Sherlock falters on the name, that name, the only name, all there is: he falters because it’s so much and he’s human, if he knows anything now it’s that he’s human and he fails and he is rich beyond his ken to have someone to grasp him, to have someone to hold him, to have someone who wants to bridge his gaps.

“John, if,” he falters, because this is something he can’t lose, this is something he must strive to keep, work to earn and never sever; “you—”

“Fuck,” John cuts him off, pulls back and looks up and marvels, stares at Sherlock with his mouth open just a bit. “Fuck, you don’t,” and John swallows, Sherlock watches the bob of his Adam’s apple, the tightening of his throat around the pulse a glimpse of infinitude. 

“You don’t know, do you?” John asks, and Sherlock already laments, aches for the distance, and he’s not sure how he survived more of it, so much of it for so long, before, but he knows without question that he never wants to attempt such a thing again. 

“You are the sun and the moon, Sherlock Holmes,” John declares, states like standard gravity, or the calculation of the silver ratio. “You are day and night, the tides and the trees and the sky. The world without you was whitewashed, before. The world without you now, Christ,” John looks ill, looks horrified at the concept, and Sherlock understands, he understands all too well; “It’s unimaginable.”

And the words are lovely, as words had never been before, but it’s the beating, the heart pumping just a bit more insistent, a bit more demanding against Sherlock’s hand, like vows are meant to be made, in flesh and blood and bone between, in righteous force and perfect synchrony—it’s the beating that makes him brave, convinces him of impossibilities, murmus in the marrow that they’re _truths_. 

“You have become my maestro and my music,” Sherlock whispers, breathes. “You are the cadence and the clues. I will love you beyond binary opposites, more than the heart holds, _needs_ blood, I will love you. I will love you, I do love you,” and Sherlock looks up, heart lodged in his throat and for once, for once Sherlock’s pulse has to jump, has to race just a bit more, flirting with danger to match John’s, to keep close.

“And if a heart is, at its simplest, at its most crucial and uncompromised,” Sherlock takes his hand from John’s chest now, hesitant, courageous in a way he’d misplaced, feared lost; “ if it is that without which we perish then you were always the heart, John.” 

He brings his fingers to John’s carotid pulse, strokes it featherlight, reverent. 

“You kept it and kindled it and you dared it to not merely beat but to sing, and without you, without this I am done, John, I am done and—”

“Shut up,” John chokes, huffs laughter and sorrow together from his chest as his pulse beneath Sherlock’s touch bubbles forth, shakes and skips and then _sings_ as he laughs now, more than sobs. “Just, shut up,” and John reaches, frames Sherlock’s face in his hands.

“I am so in love with you, I don’t know what to do with it,” he says with such conviction, such absolute certainty that it tries to lodge in Sherlock’s vessels; licks around his chest instead and buoys him, seals the breaks. “I am so in love with you that sometimes it chokes me, because I’ve forgotten it’s like air now, my air, the air in these lungs because you’re all I need to breathe.”

And that’s what they do, for a moment, for many moments, a prelude to a lifetime of moments, all of the moments they’ll ever know: they breathe.

“And I know you can feel it, can hear it, the subtle tells, the give and takes. You can suss it out just fine in theory,” John murmurs, and Sherlock drops his head now, mirrors John from before and nestles under John’s chin, tilts his head to the chest, close enough to hear, to feel, and yes, yes, he knows it, he never forgot, won’t ever forget, could never, his heart, his, _his_.

“But the soul of it, Sherlock, do you know what it means? What it means for all the pounding, for all those skipped beats and surges,” and John’s heart lags for an instant, and maybe Sherlock’s speeds, maybe it slows too, but by the time they’ve both breathed out, they’re back in tandem, they’re sure, one strand, one chord, one melody, unending; “for the syncs?”

“Do you know?” And Sherlock hears that last question through John chest, more than outside of it, and it feels as if a world’s been revealed, or restored; a prison cracked open, an exile ended, and there’s just light, and even the shadows, even the shadows are sure.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, unthinking, taken aback at the way he just _knows_. “Yes, I—”

His heart is in John’s chest, but John’s—impossible, unnatural, so much more than he’s earned, than he should ever be trusted to have; John’s is just as solidly situated under his own ribs, between his own lungs, and that is the miracle of it, unbelievable. Something he’ll never understand, but cannot deny, cannot lose, cannot take away or diminish or abandon—his heart is John’s, and John, somehow, has seen fit to give that gift in kind, to take the burden of Sherlock’s faults, the deadened corners of him and kiss them clean, and more, unthinkably, unprecedented: more than that, John has trusted Sherlock to guard and keep the whole of him, and Sherlock will not disappoint him. Sherlock will earn that right with every beat and breath he’s given. He will hold John’s heart and he will allow it to mean more than any other thing, he will ensure that it comes first, that John comes first, always. He will not fail.

“Yes.”

Oh god, _yes_.


End file.
